1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to call center provisioning, management, and supervision.
2. Background
Organizations with more than trivial needs for customer interaction often use call centers to provide services to their customers and to organize sales personnel. A call center is the means by which an organization, e.g., company or “enterprise,” handles customer and other calls, usually with some amount of computer automation. Typically, a call center can handle a considerable volume of inbound and outbound calls at the same time, screen inbound calls, forward them to agents (e.g., customer service representatives) with appropriate skills, and maintain records of the calls and of the call center agents. Call centers have traditionally been used by mail-order catalog companies, telemarketing companies, computer product help desks, and other similar organizations that use the telephone to sell or support their products and services.
Many call centers use computer-telephony integration (CTI), also known as “computer telephony,” to process telephone calls. These terms refer simply to the use of computers in managing the calls. Since the advent of the information technology revolution, companies have increasingly felt the need to interact with their customers through alternative communication channels that include, for example, facsimile transmissions, email, and web-based contacts. (We will collectively refer to such interactions and the conventional telephone calls as “e-contacts,” “contacts,” “interactions,” or simply as “calls.”) The alternative channel contacts are generally susceptible to CTI-based processing at least to the same extent as conventional telephone calls, and the benefits of computer-based management apply to them as well.
A typical modern call center is a complicated technological amalgam of hardware and software residing in whole or in part on a telecommunications network. Provisioning such a call center for an enterprise can be a lengthy, technically involved process performed by “integrators”—technicians, engineers, and programmers highly skilled in combining computer equipment, telecommunication equipment, and software from various manufacturers. Consequently, the time and costs involved in provisioning a call center may be substantial, and the ability to minimize them may provide an important competitive advantage. It is therefore desirable to enable provisioning call centers quickly and without massive efforts of trained and highly compensated specialists.
Call centers are often provisioned and hosted for clients-subscribers by providers of telecommunication services, for example, long distance telephone carriers (Telcos) and application service providers (ASPs). Thus, provisioning a call center may involve discussions between the representatives of a long distance carrier and an enterprise to define, for example, functionality of the call center; its limitations; and the capabilities available to the enterprise, such as the number and skills of the enterprise's agents. The definitions tend to be made without sufficient precision, necessitating redesigns with their concomitant additional delays and costs. It would therefore be beneficial to provide a high-level design tool for defining and provisioning a call center. Furthermore, it would be beneficial to push out the design tool's interface to a subscriber, to enable the subscriber to self-provision and administer a call center using non-technical employees, with little involvement by the service provider, such as an ASP or a Telco.
Some of the information used by a call center may be sensitive and confidential, i.e., information that the subscriber-enterprise prefers to keep in secure storage. For example, the call center may be capable of identifying a calling party-customer through automatic number identification (ANI), retrieving the customer's data such as history of the customer's interactions, and routing the call to an appropriate agent based on that data. Customer information, however, is usually kept confidential for at least three reasons. First, there are customer expectations of privacy. Second, the subscriber-enterprise does not want its competitors to use the information. And third, the enterprise may want to market the information itself. There may also exist other types of sensitive information, e.g., rules for vectoring inbound calls. To keep the information protected, the enterprise may not want to entrust a copy of its database to the telecommunications service provider or to an unsecure server. Therefore, it would be desirable to allow a subscriber to provision a call center using third-party resources while not providing the third-party with a copy of the subscriber's database.